Q: Who are public defenders?

PK: Public defenders are attorneys appointed to defend people accused of crimes that can't afford a private lawyer. They are paid by the State, by the taxpayers.

Q: What do they do?

PK: About 85% of people arrested, can't afford a private lawyer. Public defenders act as their defense attorneys.

Q: How did you get the idea to do an entire film about public defenders?

PY: We had spent the 1990s producing a series of films about poverty in America. It was called "Living Broke in Boom Times" and was about what was happening to people left out of the boom economy. Many of these people had at some point landed in jail, not because of being bad people, but because they had to break the law to survive. Public defenders are on the front lines where the poor meet the rest of society, and it's a nasty little war.

Q: What do people think about public defenders?

PK: Most people think that public defenders are the bottom of the barrel, the misfits, the people who can't find jobs as private attorneys. When, actually, they're often among the best and the brightest, and many go into public defense because they want to do a lot of trial work. A rookie pubic defender in the San Francisco Office may try more cases in their first year than a corporate lawyer will try in a lifetime. As a result, they become very good trial attorneys. But these preconceptions dog public defenders, sometimes even their own clients don't think they're bona fide attorneys.

PY: We chose to look for a very good public defender's office. Because we felt that the story about the bad public defenders -- the people who sleep through trials; the people who get paid very little to defend a serious felony -- that story had been told.

PK: The kind of legal defense that poor people get in different parts of the country differs greatly, depending on how the state perceives their obligation to live up to a person's right to legal defense. San Francisco is a very high-functioning model of how a county can provide good legal defense. This office could serve as a role model, the attorneys an inspiration.

PK: PRESUMED GUILTY is for anyone and everyone who likes a good legal drama, with all the ethical and moral dilemmas that get played out when a person's liberty is at stake. It has quirky characters, two difficult high profile murder cases and has been described as a cross between "Judge Judy" and a film by Frederick Wiseman. People who work in or have had brushed with the criminal justice system seem particularly moved. PRESUMED GUILTY goes where ever the lawyers go, and the audience gets to see the most intimate workings of the criminal defense system.

Of course we obtained formal permission from all the complex bureaucracies in the criminal justice system, the Judges, the Bailiffs, the Sherrif's Dept., the District Attorney, and the Public Defender. Furthermore, once a trial has been completed, unless the judge seals the court records for some extraordinary reason, all the records are public. Once a trial was completed we were able to obtain copies of trial evidence.

But like so many things, what it really boils down to trust. It took a while for the people we were following to realize that we weren't like the evening news, just gun and run, but that we were around, day after day, week after week. In this way we were able to bring the audience inside some of the most intimate and revealing moments between the public defenders and their clients.

Q: Would you say this was a difficult film to make?

PY: This was a very difficult film. Maybe the most difficult of any of the films that we've made at Skylight Pictures. Not that it was physically dangerous, as other films that we've done in war zones throughout Central America, but I think that intellectually it was incredibly challenging.

The criminal-justice system is a subculture that lives by its own rules. And very often we didn't know what the rules were until we broke them. Also, we had no idea that the wheels of justice do grind quite so slowly. We thought, originally, that we could shoot this film in one month. Then we thought three months. It actually ended up taking us eight months inside the Hall of Justice, the offices and jails.

Q: And why the title, PRESUMED GUILTY?

PK: Well, there's supposed to be the presumption of innocence. But actually most people think if you're arrested for a crime, you're guilty. So, first and foremost, it refers to the defendants in the cases. And, secondly, it really refers -- I think you'll understand this after you see the film -- to the public defenders themselves. That society presumes them to be guilty, because they're defending guilty people.

Q: In a surprisingly candid way, one lawyer reveals his inner conflicts through a video diary. How did this come about?

PY: The lawyer you're referring to, Will Maas, is an extremely complex person. He's also an insomniac, and we wanted to be there with him in all his waking hours. But we couldn't physically, and so we suggested that he keep a video diary during the course of the murder trial that he was pursuing. He took to it like a duck to water. Skylight Pictures had long been in the forefront of the use of video diaries, and had made use of this technique in a number of projects, from teenagers, to Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, to poor women on the edge of survival in Philadelphia.

Q: In what way did the background of the characters contribute to their style of work:

Jeff, Will, and Pheonix all had childhood experiences which resonsate with episodes of American injustice. Jeff's parents and grandparents were unfairly locked up in a Japanese detention camp, Phoenix lost an uncle to lynching in his tiny Arkansas town, and Will, straight out of a mid-western high school did three tours of combat in Vietnam, and may carry the psychic scars from those killing years with him his entire life. The experience of injustice helped each of these lawyers to transcend the gulf between lawyer and client. After all, one of the main things a good defense does is to present the client to the jury not as a "criminal" but as a human being.

Q: How do you think the public will receive "Presumed Guilty"?

PY: I think it's going to be received very, very well. We all like heroes. And really, heros are more than cops and firemen, and soldiers. And there are a lot of other people doing heroic things in society. The courage required to take on an intimidating Judge day after day is very real and the audience can feel it in PRESUMED GUILTY. And the fortitude to deal with defeat after defeat, and still come up fighting can serve as an example for all of us.

As we travelled around the country scouting locations for PRESUMED GUILTY we came upon many incredible, and very different Public Defender Offices. San Francisco has a certain feel and look and approach to indigent defense which is entirely different from Minneapolis, Minnesota, and even more different from Miami, Florida. So we would like to make a non-fiction series about public defense in many different locals and situations across the US. We have also begun pre-production on "Peru", a film about a country which traded its democratic soul for security.

Q: Describe the difference between adversarial process and a conciliatorial process.

The San Francisco Office of the Public Defenders, as run by Jeff Adachi, was an example of adversarial law. This means that the prosecution and defense see their interests as mutually exclusive and opposed. The defense fights as hard as possible to free their client, while the prosecutor does everything they can to put the person away. While this seems like a "no-brainer" in actuallity only 3% of all felonies in the US are decided by trial. All the others end up in some sort of plea bargin. There is also a tendency to do away with trials completely. This philosophy assumes the guilt of certain defendants and places the prosecution and defense on the same side advocsting for the humane treatment of the offender. This type of conciliatory law is being practiced more and more in drug and abuse csase, where alernatives to incarceration ar being used. While this may seem a logical use of resources it relies on a flawed presumption … the presumption of guilt. Under this system what happens when the wrong person is arrested? Who will fight for them?

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